This disclosure relates generally to payment card transaction systems and, more specifically, to systems and methods for throttling processing steps associated with payment card transactions based on constrained sub-systems.
Conventional payment card transaction systems perform high volumes of payment card transactions. During a typical payment card transaction, a transaction processing system receives an authentication request from, for example, a merchant acquirer. In some situations, the transaction processing system is under a service level agreement (SLA) to provide a response to the authentication request within a predetermined period of time (SLA response time), such as 3 seconds. If the transaction processing system does not respond to the authentication request within the SLA response time, the transaction automatically fails. Such failed transactions are detrimental to both the payment processor as well as the other parties to the transaction, such as the cardholding consumer or the merchant.
During some payment card transactions, consumers (i.e., cardholders) provide biometric samples that may be used to authenticate the consumer as an authorized user of the payment card. The transaction processing system may utilize a sub-processing system, such as a third-party system, to authenticate the sample biometric data (e.g., comparing a sample fingerprint to a reference fingerprint of the authorized user). During normal operations, the sub-processing system may, for example, respond to an authentication request within 1 second. However, under certain circumstances, such as periods of heavy transaction volume, the sub-processing system may become constrained. For example, under heavier volumes, the response time for authentication requests may increase to 5 seconds. This increase in time caused by the sub-processing system may cause the overall transaction to fail.